“When sitting in an armchair isn t enough… I write. What I mean is that when it no longer suffices to sit and dream about travelling to other times, other places, I write about them instead. A most economical and safe form of time travel.”
“A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.”
“It s not the writing part that s hard. What s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”
“It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can’t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period. Source: http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma...”
“There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community.”
“So I wonder what it is this need to tell. To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.”
“Research is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING”
“To get over artist s block, make shitty art.”
“I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.”
“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there d be no Resistance.”
“Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.”
“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...”
“Writing is the act of discovery.”
“The only man she ever loved. And hated.”
“I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.”
“Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.”
“I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no classical education, no literary degree. I’m not specialized, Hugoed or geniusized; should I be writing at all? In this whole vast world, I’m a female peon sitting here at night wondering what it is I want to say. I aim for fluidity. But no, nix that line, that thought, this life. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? This life: it’s out of reach. I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.”